ADAPTEC ASR-51245 + 2x SEAGATE CHEETAH 15K.6 450GB

Introduction

A few years ago, a 1.2GHz CPU was pretty fast, and 512MB of RAM was also the norm.  I can remember having a dual PIII-1GHz in a Tyan S2567 (the most bad-ass PIII board ever made!), and Win2k flew on that platform.  Now we have RAID cards with dual 1.2GHz cores, and 512MB of DDR2???  Yes indeed, and add to that hardware Adaptec's expertise in RAID, SATA, and SAS technology, you get the latest and greatest I/O monster available.  Here, we will take a look at the 16-port version, the ASR-51245.

Adaptec ASR-51245 Technical Specifications:

What better drive to match up with this crazy/fast board than Seagate's latest big cat, the Cheetah 15k.6.  Older enterprise drives were rated at 1.2M hours MTBF.  This one is rated for 1.6M hours = greater reliability.  Cache is still a good-sized 16MB, half of today's desktop drive's 32MB. 

The testbed used is comprised of the following components, and the OS is Windows XP x64.